SUNY series in Medical Anthropology – serie

This book outlines a "new ethnopsychiatry," one that considers popular or folk ethnomedicines and professional psychiatric systems in the same discourse, effacing the traditional distinction between psychiatry and ethnopsychiatry. The essays in this volume are from a diverse, interdisciplinary group representing history, psychology, sociology, and medicine, as well as anthropology. The author view both ethnomedical practices and illness as local cultural constructions. They consider ideologies and institutions from both professional and popular ethnopsychiatric systems in America, Western Europe, South Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, and India.The book demonstrates that professional and popular psychiatric medicines lie along the same local cultural continua, that professional, "scientific" psychiatries and less formalized systems of local popular psychology are epistemological relatives, aspects of common cultural discourses on normality and abnormality. The essays reject the notion of a universal, uniform reality of psychopathology beyond cultural boundaries, but the data strongly support the cultural and historically constructed nature of ethnopsychiatry, in its illness, ideologies, and institutions. Contributors to this volume include Amy V. Blue, Thomas Csordas, Ellen Dwyer, Paul E. Farmer, M.D., Atwood D. Gaines, Helena Jia Hershel, Janis Jenkins, Pearl Katz, Thomas Maretzki, Naoki Nomura, Charles Nuckolls, Kathryn Oths, Lorna Amarasingham Rhodes, and Leslie Swartz.

While menopause is a universal fact of life, the physiological and psychological effects for women are not the same in all cultures. In this comparative and cross-cultural ethnographic study, Beyene examines the concept and experience of menopause among Greek and Mayan peasant women, uncovering some startling information. Available research and experience thus far suggests that non-Western, nonindustrialized women often do not have the same psychological or physiological reactions to menopause as Western, industrialized women do.By comparing the reproductive histories of one group of peasant women to another, the author makes it possible to isolate historical, cultural and environmental factors relating to variations or similarities in response to menopause. Her findings underscore the plasticity of the human aging experience, particularly among women. The book presents a biocultural view linking the experience of menopause to diet and fertility patterns, and provides new insights and hypotheses on the reproductive cycle and aging in women.

Du Toit contributes to the study of the climacteric as an important phase of the life cycle among women of different cultures (the later reproductive and postreproductive years). Drawing upon perspectives in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and gerontology, he demonstrates the need for an adequate cross-cultural theory of aging among women, and offers a solid body of research from South Africa in establishing a standard methodology for the study of the climacteric.

Based on qualitative and quantitative studies in the United States and Puerto Rico, this book demonstrates the significant effect of patients' and health care providers' ethnic and cultural backgrounds on chronic pain.Based on qualitative and quantitative studies in the United States and Puerto Rico, this book demonstrates the significant effects of patients' and health providers' ethnic and cultural backgrounds on the chronic pain experience. A biocultural model from medical anthropology is used to contribute to a better understanding of the interaction of biology and culture in human pain perception. In the studies described, the factors most often associated with successful adjustment to chronic pain are not biomedical but cultural, psychosocial, or the cultural, political, and economic contexts of medical care, compensation and rehabilitation. Truly multi-disciplinary chronic pain treatment programs must be staffed by providers knowledgeable in cultural relativity and cultural self-awareness and should integrate a cultural assessment with an individualized rehabilitation and biopsychosocial treatment plan for each patient.